Friday, 4 September 2015

Passing by the Phoenix
Theatre on the Rock'n'Roll London Walk recently (on our way to the famous
Saville Theatre) and something suddenly caught my eye in the design…

The architect at work
is Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and the theatre dates from 1930.

I'd noticed the
pilasters before, of course – the four carved 2-D, "flat pillars",
two either side of the facade.

But last week, for the
first time, I caught an echo of another of Gilbert Scott's famous London
buildings which also features four upright "columns" as its central
motif…

Granted, the "columns"
on Battersea Power Station were designed to be more than decorative, but… if
you take the two central pilasters on The Phoenix (see above) and push them backward, and
then take the two outer pilasters and pull them forwards, the Phoenix becomes a
neo-classical, 2-D fold-out
Battersea Power Station.

Both buildings have
musical connections. The Pheonix was opened in 1930 with the play Private Lives, written by Noel
Coward, Coward being one of England's leading pop song writers of the first
half of the 20th Century. In more recent years, chart-topping pop stars have
appeared here in musicals: Ronan Keating of Boyzone in Once; Marti Pellow of
Wet Wet Wet, Petula Clark and Mel C of the Spice Girls in Blood Brothers. All
the acts mentioned achieved UK number one singles.*

Battersea Power
Station can be glimpsed in The Beatles film Help! The interior features on the
sleeve of Hawkwind's 1977 album Quark, Strangeness and Calm. Most famously, of
course, it appears on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals – as featured in issue one of the Rock'n'Roll London Comic Book.

* We don't usually set out to cover the Spice Girls, or Wet Wet Wet, Boyzone or Noel Coward on the Rock'n'Roll London Walk, but our Walkers have famously eclectic tastes!